Language to Dream
Permanent installation at 125th Street Carnegie Library, 224 E 125th St, New York, NY 10035
Dye sublimation on aluminum, Bottom Wall, Freedom to Read: 18x12 feet, Top Wall, Freedom to Imagine: 10x13 feet ©2024
Commissioned by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program in collaboration with New York Public Library and the Economic Development Corporation
Public libraries embody the highest ideals of a democratic society. For the New York Public Library, 125th Street branch in East Harlem, I created a two-wall design that emphasizes freedom of expression and access to information as the foundation for creativity, education, and enlightenment in American society. The first wall seen upon entering the library depicts multiracial hands pulling each other up through the medium of books. The second-floor wall depicts a bird’s eye view of a diverse group of young people reading in a circle in the sky. Both the top and bottom walls have text interwoven throughout the images. The bottom wall, Freedom to Read, features text from established social agreements; the First Amendment and the three core documents from the American Library Association: The Library Bill of Rights, Libraries: An American Value, and The Freedom to Read. The imagery and text in the first mural support the ideas of dreaming and discovery in the second mural, Freedom to Imagine. Without the freedom to read and access to information we could not so easily engage in artistic and intellectual contemplation and creation. The top wall has poems, quotes and excerpts that reflect this freedom, as well as the joy and desire to read and create. The text creates a patch-worked over the different readers showing connectivity through reading. The image is colored where there is text and the remaining areas are in greyscale, signifying the words bringing the image to life.
Many thanks to the poets and writers who allowed me to use their text within Freedom to Imagine:
1. Maya Angelou, "Caged Bird"
2. Gwendolyn Bennett, "Quatrains"
3. Emily Jane Bronte, "To Imagination"
4. Lewis Carroll, "A Strange Wild Song"
5. Anne Carson, ''The Glass Essay" (Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation)
6. Ching-In Chen, "Dear O"
7. Clark Coolidge, untitled poem
8. Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., "Rain Music"
9. Clarissa Scott Delany, "Solace"
10. Emily Dickinson, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers"
11. Emily Dickinson, "XXI. A Book"
12. Frederick Douglass, quote
13. Frederick Douglass, quote 2
14. W.E.B. Du Bois, Letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to Yolande Du Bois
15. W.E.B. Du Bois, quote
16. W.E.B. Du Bois, quote 2
17. Jessie Redmon Fauset, "Douce Souvenance"
18. Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"
19. Ernest Gaines, quote from A Conversation with Ernest J. Gaines by Lawrence Bridges (Used by permission of Lawrence Bridges)
20. Jack Gilbert, "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" (Used by permission of Penguin Random House)
21. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, "Songs for the People"
22. Sadakichi Hartmann, "Twilight Hours"
23. Langston Hughes, "Dreams"
24. Alyse Knorr, "Archive Fever"
25. Tato Laviera, "Spanglish", (Used by permission of Arte Publico Press Publication)
26. Audre Lorde, "Coal", (Used by permission of the estate of Audre Lorde)
27. Claude Mckay, "I Know My Soul"
28. John Milton, Areopagitica
29. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, "God's Language"
30. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, "James Baldwin Eulogy"
31. Toni Morrison, quote
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, quote
33. Naomi Shihab Nye, "Famous"
34. William Shakespeare, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day"
35. Shel Silverstein, "Falling Up" from Falling Up by Shel Silverstein Illustrated by Shel Silverstein. (Copyright ©1996 Evil Eye Music, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers)
36. Padma Venkatraman, "Whenever You See a Tree"
37. Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother, (Used by permission Penguin Random House)
38. Alice Walker, "Desire," from The World Will Follow Joy, (Reprinted by permission of The Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc.)
39. James Weldon Johnson, "Lift Every Voice and Sing"
40. Virginia Woolf, quote
41. Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming, (Copyright ©2014 by Jacqueline Woodson)
42.William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
43. W. B. Yeats, "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"
Text and images in open books:
44. David Baskin, Dove Bottles
45. Elizabeth C. Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments, (Used by permission of Cornell University Press)
46. Cathy Ellis, Pink Tent
47. Jessica Lagunas, 'i Spik Inglish"
48. Zora Neale Hurston, "John Redding Goes to Sea"
49. Peter J Reynolds, The Book Collector
50. John Steinbeck, East of Eden, (Used by permission of Estate of John Steinbeck)
51. Rachael Wren, Parhelion